Milena Abrahamyan is a feminist from the intersection of the west and the Other. She believes in the power womyn have. She is a poet because she is queer and queer because she is a poet. Milena considers Shushan Avagyan to be one of the most important contemporary feminist authors in Armenian time.

Khoren Aramouni is a Los Angeles-based writer whose short stories, novels, memoirs and plays have been published in Yerevan and Los Angeles. His fiction and nonfiction works regularly appear in Armenian media outlets and many of his plays have been produced in Armenia and the U.S.

Ani Asatryan was born around the time of Armenia’s independence from the Soviet Union. She studies art, literature, and is one of the most celebrated female writers in Armenia today. In 2014, her first “unreadable” book was published. This book attempted to break the conventional borders of literature and visual art in order to highlight the ties that exist between literary text, sound, image, and memory.

Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is the author of the novel Girk-anvernagir [Book, Untitled] (2006) and co-author of Zarubyani Kanayq [The Women of Zarubyan] (2014). She has translated several books into English, including I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (AIWA Press, 2005). Her articles and translations have appeared in Context, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Music & Literature, and Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. She currently teaches at the American University of Armenia.

Christian Batikian is an Armenian author, born in Beirut and raised in Istanbul and Paris. He has been writing since his adolescent years, and has been published for over a decade in prominent journals, newspapers, and anthologies all over the world, not limited to: Paris, Istanbul, Armenia, and Lebanon. Batikian is a highly respected and loved author internationally, and composes his stories in Western Armenian, the dialect of Armenian that is currently on UNESCO list of endangered languages. He currently resides in Yerevan, Armenia.

Krikor Beledian is an Armenian poet, novelist, and literary critic born in Lebanon and living in France. His work has been published in Beirut, Paris, Yerevan, and Los Angeles. He teaches at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.

Tamar M. Boyadjian is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at Michigan State University. Her academic and creative research and teaching focuses on transcultural interactions between various ethno-religious cultures from the medieval to the contemporary period. She also teaches courses on translation and translation theory, with an emphasis on trauma, postcolonial studies, and endangered languages. Her poetry and scholarly work have been published widely all over the world.

Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University, Long Beach. She is the co-editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.

Anna Davtyan is a writer, translator and photographer born in Armenia. She is the author of the bilingual (Armenian, English) poetry collection Book of Gratitude (Yerevan, 2012). Her translation projects feature the works of the Beat Generation--Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others. Davtyan’s drama A Shipload of Carnations for Hrant Dink was staged by the German theater Krefeld und Monchengladbach in September 2016. 

Dzovinar Derderian is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor focusing on nineteenth-century Ottoman history.

Alec Ekmekji wanted to become a writer when he was a teenager. Instead he studied physics and mathematics in college and worked as an engineer in the defense industry, working to keep the free world free. After the fall of the Soviet Union he turned to writing poetry and short stories again, and to translating Armenian poetry into English.

Violet Grigoryan was born in Tehran before her family repatriated in Armenia in 1975. She was one of the founders of the literary journal Inknagir, for which she currently serves as its editor. The author of four books of poems, Grigoryan has won the Writers' Union of Armenia poetry award for [True, I’m Telling the Truth] (1991), and the Golden Cane prize in literature for [The City] (1998). Her poems have been anthologized in France, and in the English-language collections The Other Voice: Armenian Women’s Poetry Through the Ages (2006) and Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature (2008).

Nairi Hakhverdi is a translator, writer, and editor. She grew up in the Netherlands where she attended international schools and earned a degree in English language and literature. In 2009, she moved to Armenia, where she taught literary translation at Yerevan State Linguistic University for three years. She has translated numerous classical and contemporary Armenian authors into English, and her works have appeared in several international publications, including Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and City Books. In 2017, her translations of two novels, Aram Pachyan’s Goodbye Bird and Hovhannes Tekgyozyan’s Fleeting City, were respectively published by Glagoslav Publications and Mosaic Press.

Vahan Ishakhanian—the compiler of the Armenian text—is a writer who resides in Armenia and is the author of many journalistic articles, blogs, and books.

Karen Jallatyan is a Comparative Literature Ph.D. candidate from University of California, Irvine. His research interests are cinema and contemporary Armenian literatures in relation to other literary and artistic traditions.   

Narine Jallatyan is a Ph.D. student in the department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her fields of interest include 20th-century Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean poetry and the poetic production of the Armenian Diaspora within the theoretical framework of post-colonial and diaspora studies. Her research explores ways in which the discourse of poetry thinks, feels, or overcomes the impact of a traumatic past on language that bears the marks of such a past. Narine has an M.A degree in Comparative Literature and a B.A degree in International Development Studies, both from UCLA.

Shushan Karapetian is a lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her dissertation, “How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?”: A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles, won the Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award for 2011-2014. Her research interests focus on heritage languages and speakers, particularly on the case of Armenian heritage speakers in the Los Angeles community, about which she has presented and lectured widely.

Karén Karslyan is a poet, novelist, translator, musician, and a visual artist. He is the author of Aterazma, a typographic film (Inknagir, 2016), Doomed to Spell, a collection of 38 deformed hayrens (Inknagir, 2010), X Frames/Sec, a collection of works including a minimalist novel of the same name and poems (Bnagir, 2003). Armenia’s public TV station declared him the Scandalous Writer of the Year 2003 for X Frames/Sec. He is the recipient of Young Artists Award for the manuscript of Password, a novel in progress. He is also the editor of the Armenian translation of Hedgehog in the Fog, a collection of fairy tales by Sergey Kozlov (2016). He received his PhD in English from the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. (More at www.karenkarslyan.com).

Lilit Keshishyan holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her academic work explores the intricacies and challenges posed by issues of identity, language, and place in the literature of the Armenian diaspora.

Raymond Boghos Kupelian (1936-), born in Iskenderun, has been writing fiction, short stories and essays since the mid-60's. His work brings the experience and keen appreciation of the various worlds he has encountered from Africa to the Middle East. His novels, short stories and essays have been translated into a number of different languages including English, Russian and Arabic. Having lived both in Lebanon and Sierra Leone, Kupelian now makes his home in Los Angeles.

Roger Kupelian is an independent filmmaker who, partly inspired by his childhood in Sierra Leone, creates worlds using words, images and visual effects. A 23-year veteran of the Hollywood Visual Effects machine, he has worked on many Hollywood blockbuster films, such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. He is a proud bookworm, and creator of his own East of Byzantium graphic novel series.

Marc Nichanian is a philosopher and literary scholar who has taught in France (University of Strasbourg), the United States (UCLA and Columbia University), Turkey (Sabanci University), and now Armenia (AUA). He is the author of a history of the Armenian language and a multivolume history of 20th century Armenian literature. His most recent publications include in Turkish: Edebiyat ve Felaket [Literature and Catastrophe] (Iletişim, 2011), in English: The Historiographic Perversion (Columbia University Press, 2009), Mourning Philology (Fordham University Press, 2014), in French: Le Sujet de l'histoire (Lignes, 2015), in Armenian: Patker, patum, patmut'iun [Image, narrative, history] in two volumes (ActualArt, Yerevan, 2015-16), and most recently Nietzsche, vasn inqnishkhanoutean [Nietzsche, the will to sovereignty] (Inknagir, 2017). He has translated works from Maurice Blanchot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, into (Western) Armenian.

Aram Pachyan was born on March 19, 1983, to a family of doctors. He studied law at Yerevan State University in Armenia between 1999 and 2004. After graduating, he began to write short stories and essays, which were eventually published in Armenian magazines, including Literary Journal, Gretert, and Yeghitsi Luys. He is the author of two collections of short stories, “Robinson” and Ocean, and of the novel, Goodbye, Bird. His works have been translated into English, Ukrainian, and Russian.

Michael Pifer is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Michigan; he is currently writing a literary history of medieval Anatolia.

Ikna Sarıaslan is a highly celebrated Armenian poet whose work reflects on questions of love, identity, and the city of Istanbul. He currently resides in Turkey, where he serves on the PEN Turkey board.

Vehanoush Tekian was born in Beirut in 1948 and has studied Philosophy and English Literature in the American University of Beirut. She has started writing early on, contributing to various diaspora Armenian periodicals. Currently residing in New Jersey, Tekian has published 11 volumes of prose and poetry.

Maroush Yeramian is a contemporary Armenian author and teacher; in her succinct style, she describes herself as a poet of Aleppo.